WAS IT A POEM

Was Elvis always conceived as a poem? Or is this the final destination of a sequence of thoughts that never made it into a U2 song? Listening to the finished result 14 years after the words were written, you have to wonder. Not least because Elvis doesn’t sound too far removed from the area of sonic experimentation that U2 inhabited throughout the 1990s in albums such as Zooropa and Pop.

It might sound like an inspired B-side; in reality it’s an accidental collaboration between Bono and Chris O’Shaughnessy, the composer who set about creating an apposite setting for the singer’s words. Though the two have never met, it’s hard to imagine Bono being other than flattered by the results.

O’Shaughnessy’s procession of archive material and original incidental music has amplified the scope of Bono’s words beyond any setting that he must have imagined. In Bono’s eyes, the Bible has always been the greatest story ever told, but over the past two decades the story of Elvis has run it close.

Writing for Rolling Stone magazine five years ago, Bono referred to the effect of Presley’s music. “He was already doing what the civil rights movement was demanding: breaking down barriers. You don’t think of Elvis as political, but that is politics — changing the way people see the world.”